Implementing a configuration tool for CANopen based electronic devices

The subject of my project is to develop an application which can configure, parameterise and run diagnostics on CANopen based electronic devices. The need for this software came from the Electro and Manufacturing department of the Research Institution Hungary Kft. The main activity of this department is engineering and manufacturing embedded electronic devices.

The paper contains an overview of the CAN and CANopen protocols and a study regarding CANopen implementations that can be found in the market. The project is about designing and implementing a software which is able to read object libraries, write service data object and configure process data object via CAN bus according to the CANopen protocol, and storing and restoring these configurations.

The software was named CanTool, based on its ability to configure any kind of CANopen based electronic devices. The program consists of two parts: a WPF based graphical user interface and a C++ attacher dll containing the business logic. The resulting application is able to configure the API R3000 autodiagnostic robots used by the company.